146 
not reflect on the course of his observations With- 
out pleasure and 
hope, 
led 
he was often 
to advert 
to the lamentable state into which every thing, as 
well as Art, had fallen in Italy, in consequence of 
the general theocrutical despotism which over- 
spread 
the whole 
country, 
like 
an 
unwholesome 
V3P0ur: 
and_ 
of 
those 
minute 
subdivisions 
of 
territory, 
in 
w h ic h 
tyranny 
political 
exercised its 
baleful 
inHuence 
GVCH 
where 
the 
ecclesiastical 
oppression seemed disposed to spare. He saw, in 
the infamous establishment of the cicisbeo, the 
settled effect of that general disposition to palliate 
vice, which is the first symptom of decay in na- 
tions; and he was convinced that, before vice 
could 
be 
thus 
exalted 
into 
custom, 
there 
must 
such 
the community which would tolerate 
exist in 
an institution, a disregard of all those obligations 
which it is the "pride of virtue to incur, and the 
object of law to preserve. It seemed to him that 
every thing in 
a state of disease; 
Italy was in 
and 
that the moral energy was subsiding, as the vital 
Hame diminishes from the progress of old age. For 
although the forms and graces of the human cha- 
racter were often seen in all their genuine dignity 
among the common people, still even the gene-